I use emacs+evil; tried out spacemacs but found it over-customized. I want to know what everything in my .emacs does, and if I don't like something, how to change it. Spacemacs was way too overwhelming for me.
Another long time vim user, I switched to emacs+evil then to spacemacs back to vim back to emacs+evil. Spacemacs was good but I started to feel bogged down, as I do with big ide's and went back to a very minimal vim.
I have now started back with emacs + evil and a minimal setup. I find it gives me the best of all worlds.
everyone talks about spacemacs=vim. this is nice, but what turned me off of spacemacs was the layers config abstractions. It breaks the normal configuration of emacs.
Just install evil mode and a few contrib packages.. that's spacemacs lite.